It’s all about robots and sugar cubes this afternoon. A crunchy animation with a ’60s space age feel, Une Mission Ephémère was crafted in 1993 by Polish animator Piotr Kamler and scored by experimental/musique concrète composer Bernard Parmegiani. The best part of this clip is watching the way the robot’s facial expressions change as he sculpts playthings and conducts experiments while floating in his little bowl. More clips by Kamler – including Chronopolis, which was his first and only full-length feature – can be found at UbuWeb. Chronopolis and Kamler’s work is often characterized as “science fiction,” but have more in common with Borges than with Star Wars, as one excellent write-up on Kamler notes. [Another hat-tip to Wobbly.]
“I thought only my classmates, mom and dad would watch this,” wrote French animation student Stéphanie Mercier in the Vimeo comments for the clip above after witnessing an influx of visitors from MetaFilter,Daily What, SocImages and beyond. Titled “Girls Suck at Video Games,” the animation presents the challenge of climbing the corporate ladder, maintaining a stylish image, having babies and doing housework though the use of beloved 8-bit/16-bit metaphors: Super Mario Bros, Street Fighter, Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Compare and contrast with Dan the Man.
Anthony Francisco Schepperd’s animated video for Blockhead’s “The Music Scene” imagines “a post human New York where TV and animals rule.” One could also describe it as a pop-culture fueled acid trip. With animals. It’s great either way.
Since I would merely be cribbing their words anyway I shall allow lens culture (who is also selling the DVD) explains the mechanics of photographer/animator Antonio Martinez’s Near the Egress:
First, Antonio Martinez spent a lot of time at a traveling circus, shooting dozens of rolls of 35mm black-and-white film. Then he made over 800 modern dryplate tintypes from the negatives, and then scanned them digitally, and then sequenced them artfully to produce this experimental stop-motion video.
The result of all this photography and video manipulation is a bizarre fever-dream of a circus, something one would imagine entertaining the dead in an afterlife set in a David Lynch film. In other words, it’s fantastic. The project took Martinez 4 years to complete and I would say that the end result has been absolutely worth the time and effort it took to create.
An animated short by Joe Bichard and Jack Cunningham, buy cialisMARS! tells the story of, seek well, medicine the planet Mars. Specifically it details the meeting of two groups of creatures. The first is a menagerie of Tetrominoe-esque creatures who inhabit the center of the planet. The second are a flotilla of space-faring ships who land on Mars for more sinister reasons.
Crater Face by Skyler Page is an exercise in simplicity in every regard, from its story to its animation and Dan Deacon’s music. Despite this — or, perhaps, because of it depending if you’re of the mindset — it is completely engrossing, with an incredible sense of humor and melancholy packed into its four plus minutes.
Andreas Hykade’s frenetic short film, set to a thumping, grinding soundtrack, is a voyage through the history of animation viewed through a prism of potent hallucinogens. Part of the the 6th annual NFB Online film contest from The National Film Board of Canada, in association with the Cannes Short Film Corner, it’s disturbingly hypnotic and I’ve watched it through two or three times this afternoon, in the grip of a powerful stupor.
For your consideration: Alexandre DUBOSC‘s short stop-motion filmFood About You — to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Annecy film festival — in which a chocolate cake is made in the traditional manner.
I had posted previously that I retain from my childhood the visualization of my body in metaphorical terms, especially during times of illness. The accompanying video was one which evoked those thoughts but was still realistic enough to be incongruous with the visuals conjured up by my imagination. In contrast, Henning M. Lederer’s short animation, Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man As Industrial Palace) — based on the 1927 Fritz Kahn illustration of the same name, previously posted by the lovely Miss Lev in these very pages — is an almost perfect representation of the imagery in my mind. Here the various functions of the body are represented in lucid, mechanical terms; a network of pistons, pumps, pulleys, and tubes manned by an industrious, miniature workforce. It’s simply fantastic. Definitely one to watch in full screen mode.
One mustn’t get too put out by who one’s friends choose to play with.
So goes the story of Ian Worrel’s short animated film, Second Wind featuring an old man and his giant feline traveling companion. It’s a beautiful six minutes, rife with expressive animation and a haunting score. Just the thing to perk up a boring Wednesday afternoon.
